Diary

Because I had a DNA test done, I joined Ancestry.com for six months in order to follow up on it, and my membership will be expiring soon. During this period I have spent a lot of time on genealogy and have found out a few new things about my family history. Unless you have famous or wealthy ancestors, it is difficult to find much detail, and most of your ancestors appear as names, places and dates. However, if you keep at it, some pictures begin to emerge, in my case through the trades of the males over multiple generations. Then, as you approach the present, if you know about your grandparents and great-grandparents through direct family sources, you get some sense of the social changes and adaptations that people in your family made over the course of a few hundred years.

I've had the most success with the Wayre family background of my English grandmother. I've traced it back to about 1670 in the town of Spofforth, Yorkshire, which is a few miles west of York, near Harrogate. In the early documents, they spelled their name "Whare," and, beginning with my great-great-great-great grandfather, William, who was born in 1749, they changed the spelling to "Wayre." William may have been one of the first in the family to leave farming. He became an apprentice hosier in 1769 and had a shop on Stonegate in York for many years. By 1804, he was a stocking manufacturer, hatter and furrier. Many of his sons and grandsons continued in his line of work, with shops in Hull, Leeds, Nottingham and London. His great-grandson and my great-grandfather, Arthur L'Estrange Wayre, was the last Wayre furrier and lived in London. The family story is that Arthur's first wife died when her nightgown caught fire. They were married for seven years, during which time she produced five children. His second wife, my great-grandmother, had another six children. On the London wedding photograph that I posted earlier, he is the third person from the left on the back row.

Besides filling in the family tree, I've also had some contact with distant relatives. I emailed a second cousin in England whose grandfather, my great-uncle, corresponded with me in 1977. She sent me a photograph of my grandparents at her parents' wedding in 1961. I've also been in touch with a more distant Wayre relative who provided some genealogical details that were new to me. In addition, the DNA test has put me into contact with one distant relative of each of my English grandparents. It's a little ludicrous to think that you've discovered a significant family connection, but at least these are people with the same hobby as you who may have some useful information. So far, all of them have been in England. Eventually I may hear from relatives on the Armenian side.

I've started another book, but have not read enough of it to comment yet and will on my next post. I have reached a point at which I can find very little that I am able to read with much enthusiasm – this is a cyclical event that I run into every once in a while. The problem I have is that I prefer contemporary writing, and within that category the books tend to be either too commercial or too academic for me. Looking through the books reviewed in The New York Times, nearly all of them were written for mass audiences. If they are fiction, I tend to find them formulaic and lacking in insight; if they are nonfiction, I tend to find them too contrived and dumbed-down to take seriously. I would guess that at least ninety percent of the bestsellers from either category specifically target readers who are not selective about what they read and can be attracted by advertising. Some of these books can be all right, as was the case with Collapse, but that was exceptional because it included original work and speculation by a thoughtful author. I was less impressed by Thinking, Fast and Slow, because it consisted mainly of the rehashing of old research without a critical evaluation of its relevance to the current state of affairs in the world. As for fiction, besides all of the qualitative problems I've mentioned in the past, there remains the greater question of whether it is still a valid form of art: consumer art is an oxymoron to me, given that the people who sell it are not qualified to make that distinction. As far as academic books are concerned, if I chance upon one that I like, I might enjoy it, but most academics these days seem to be poor writers and to operate in such narrow spheres that they are unable to think beyond their fields of expertise, or their books may be more technical than is appropriate for a casual reading.